Thanks for your interest! I am Kevin Kauffman, a private independent Board Certified Patient Advocate practicing in the greater Reading / Berks County area of southeastern Pennsylvania and the owner of Certified Patient Services, LLC. The foundation upon which my unique career path would ultimately evolve formed very early in life with my immutable love of everything science, insatiable hunger for knowledge, innate problem-solving skills, unwavering moral compass, and a near-pathological compulsion to help those in need. It wasn’t long before those close to me began seeking me out for my talent for researching, making sense of, and interpreting their symptoms and other health issues for them. And then when I faced my own serious health concerns later in life, and through the emerging conduit of social media, I truly saw the power of turning the knowledge and skills that I had gained by helping myself outward to help others with similar conditions. Helping anyone, anywhere, with whatever condition they suffered from was just the next logical step in this evolution.

It was in 2012, during my own recovery from a second major surgery, when I founded the now largest private repository on Facebook of curated news and information about and relating to heart arrhythmias, heart disease, and all underlying and otherwise related conditions. With the encouragement and support of the loyal members of this group, I wrote and published a well-received and widely distributed medical autobiography of my experiences as a patient with these conditions. A revised edition of this book is now in the works.

In 2017, I completed my Patient Advocacy training through the Professional Patient Advocate Institute in preparation for taking the first ever patient advocacy certification exam in early 2018 offered by the Patient Advocate Certification Board. Passing the exam, I became one of the first 149 advocates worldwide to earn the new BCPA credential. Later that year, I was nominated and selected to be part of the Alliance for Aging Research‘s “Senior Patient & Family Caregiver’s Network” of 2018, to serve on their atrial fibrillation panel and participate in their Research Advocate Training Program, which ultimately led to my acceptance by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute as a stand-by Merit Reviewer, eligible to be called upon to participate in the various stages of evaluation and decision-making that appropriate government funding to medical research projects.

For any of this to have been possible, though, it all started with earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Psychology from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which led to a somewhat “conventional” life in the corporate world — advancing through positions in electronic component-level and circuit-level design and manufacturing, database administration and programming, and finally, senior IT management. Corporate burn-out set in while I was also going through a few major life events, and that spawned a brief foray into starting businesses in the food service industry, which marked what would be the beginning of my departure from the norm as I strove to somehow make my own mark on the world. Those health issues that I mentioned earlier soon detoured my plans, however, and I fell back on my known skill set, starting and operating a freelance technology consulting business for the next 10+ years.

Little did I know at the time that these unexpected health problems that thwarted my efforts to strike out on my own and seemingly derailed my dreams actually would be relaunching me on a trajectory that I perhaps should have been on all along. During my years-long medical ordeal, I worked as much as I was able to at growing my business but spent nearly all of my free time on my new “hobby” — helping people to understand, cope with, and get the help they needed for their medical problems. It didn’t take long to realize that whenever I was not helping these people, I wanted to be. This was truly my passion and my calling, and I knew then that this was how I was supposed to make my mark — not necessarily on the world as a whole, but on just one person at a time. And my plans to pursue Patient Advocacy as a full-time profession quickly ensued.

Continuing Education credits received:

• Health Insurance Ins and Outs
• Advances in Telemedicine and Digital Health to Support Improved Access to Care
• Advance Care Planning
• Cannabis Therapeutics
• The Cancer Journey Roadmap
• Perinatal Risk
• Using the Mental Health System
• Accessing Medication Patient Assistance Programs
• Sleep, Stress, and Productivity
• Working with LGBTQ Patients
• Strategies to Dismantle Racism in the Healthcare System
• Executive Functions in Neurological Conditions

Attended the first annual International Conference on Patient Advocacy (ICOPA 2019).